Assistant Director - Enterprise Applications

The Assistant Director – Enterprise Applications provides senior leadership for the organization’s enterprise applications function across on-premises and partially hybrid environments. Combining hands-on technical depth with management responsibility, the role owns applications strategy, modernization, and governance while leading the applications team — including the Manager – Enterprise Applications — and managing the project portfolio, budgets, vendors, and documentation standards. The role reports to the Director / Head of IT and coordinates closely with the DevOps, Systems, Security, and Development teams.

Strategy & Applications Leadership

•    Define and own the enterprise applications strategy and roadmap, aligned with organizational and digital-transformation goals.

•    Lead application modernization at a program level — microservices adoption, containerization, and progressive standardization of the application estate.

•    Set architecture standards, policies, and quality benchmarks across the application lifecycle.

•    Advise the Director / senior leadership on technology direction, risks, trade-offs, and investment priorities.

Team Leadership & People Management

•    Lead, mentor, and develop the applications team, including the Manager – Enterprise Applications and supporting engineers.

•    Manage resource planning, hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and capacity allocation.

•    Drive knowledge transfer, training, and continuous skill development across the team.

•    Foster strong cross-functional collaboration with the DevOps, Systems, Security, and Development teams.

Project & Program Management

•    Plan, prioritize, and oversee the application project portfolio — scope, timelines, budgets, dependencies, and risk.

•    Apply structured delivery methodologies (Agile/Scrum, ITIL, PMP/PRINCE2-aligned) and track milestones to completion.

•    Govern change management, release approvals, and stakeholder reporting.

•    Ensure projects deliver measurable business value and align with the broader IT roadmap.

Technical Oversight (Applications)

•    Provide architectural direction for enterprise applications, integrations, databases, and web/application-serving platforms.

•    Oversee application-tier high availability, performance, scalability, and resilience.

•    Guide CI/CD and containerization direction with the DevOps team, and observability/monitoring strategy across applications.

•    Set direction for application authentication and SSO integration, in line with Security-team policy.

Administration, Governance & Documentation

•    Own documentation standards — architecture records, runbooks, deployment playbooks — with robust version control (Git/GitLab).

•    Manage budgets, software licensing, procurement, and vendor/contract relationships for the applications function.

•    Ensure compliance, audit readiness, and alignment with ITIL and IT-governance frameworks.

•    Coordinate application continuity and disaster-recovery governance with the Systems and Security teams.

Preferred Skills & Technologies

Leadership & Management

•    Team Leadership: people management, mentoring, performance management, capacity and resource planning.

•    Project & Program Management: Agile/Scrum, ITIL, PMP/PRINCE2 (a plus), roadmapping, Jira / GitLab boards.

•    Administration: budgeting, vendor and contract management, licensing, procurement.

•    Governance & Documentation: architecture and technical documentation, policy authoring, audit and compliance.

Technical Foundation (Core)

•    Enterprise Applications: Moodle, ERP/SIS, authentication servers, microservice-based apps, NGINX/PHP stacks, Node.js, modern frameworks (React, Next.js, Vue).

•    Databases: MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL, Galera Cluster, replication, Redis/Memcached caching.

•    Web & Application Serving: NGINX, Apache, DNS, SSL/TLS, Cloudflare CDN/WAF.

•    Integration & SSO: SAML, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, MFA, LDAP.

•    CI/CD & Automation: GitLab CI/CD, Ansible, Bash/Python scripting, Git.

•    Containerization & Observability: Docker; Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry.

Technical (Plus)

•    Orchestration: OpenShift or Kubernetes.

•    Advanced DevOps: Helm, GitOps (Argo CD / Flux), service mesh (Istio/Linkerd).

•    Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform; hybrid integration and API gateways (Kong/APISIX).

  Professional Attributes

•    Strategic thinker who retains hands-on technical credibility.

•    Strong leadership, people management, and mentoring capability.

•    Excellent stakeholder communication and executive-level reporting.

•    Sound decision-making, prioritization, and risk management under pressure.

•    Process-oriented and ITIL-aligned, with a focus on reliability and continuous improvement.

•    Proven cross-functional collaboration across technical and business teams.

Experience & Qualifications

•    10+ years in enterprise application / IT environments, including 3+ years in a leadership or management capacity.

•    Demonstrated success leading teams and delivering application projects in mission-critical environments.

•    Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or a related field (Master’s a plus).

•    Relevant certifications a plus — ITIL, PMP/PRINCE2, and application/DevOps credentials.

Salary
Market Competitive